Marinanow, is a new site for people who want to book berths for their boats and also charter. It’s now raised €370,000 of early stage investment from led by European VC United Ventures. The market for this is not your average – it has a yearly value of over €200bn. Admittedly it’s not quite Airbnb for berths yet, but this is where it could head. With Marinanow you search by location then book and pay for the berth online. It now has over 1000 marinas and ports with 4000 boats covering Italy, France, Spain and Croatia.

Maxi yachts can charter for hundreds of thousand of Euros every week and additional services like bunker age (refuelling of the boats) can easily double this number, which makes for an attractive prospect when scaled worldwide.

But boat owners face a problem when trying to book berths as there is no global database of berths. And the market is quite fragmented.

Founded in Sardinia, Italy, in 2012, Marinanow was created by Alessandro Sestini, Paolo Codina and Andrea Corvaglia who all have experience working in marinas. Spun out of the The Net Value incubator, the site was tested in the summer of 2013 and offers boat chartering, hiring berths from privates (an Airbnb style service for the nautical world) and refuelling services.

Alessandro Sestini, CEO of Marinanow, says “we took a proven business model from the hotel and flight booking industry and applied it to a similar industry that is surprisingly badly served from a technological standpoint.”

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OverviewMarinanow is an online portal that allows sailors to search for places to moor their boats in marinas, compare prices between varyious marinas and book online.
The current systems for booking places for private boats in marinas both in the mediterranean and worldwide is outdated and complicated. There is no one unified system for managing bookings so owners of boats currently have to search for phone …